Ghana's Digital Dilemma

Some random reader writes: "Here is a fascinating Technology Review article about information technology in the West African nation of Ghana. It's an illustration of how new technology relies on, and can be hampered by, old technology. It's also a testament to the ingenuity of the people there who are working to maintain and update the country's IT infrastructure. These folks are working with a terrible phone system and frequent power outages, but they still manage to succeed."

Comments

Interested in helping out in Ghana?

[slipandfall]

My sister just spent four months in Ghana working for a volunteer program called Geekcorps. The way it works is that you work a four month stint with a local company or NGO. One of the projects my sister did involved building the web site for the Ghanaian parliament. So, we're talking significant impact here.

If you have tech skills, four months to kill and are looking to make an appreciable impact in the future of a nation, check it out.

Ghana is not a black hole of Tecnology

[sun2day]

In his article G. Pascal Zachary got quite a few of the facts are wrong, and he totally misses the point. Far more important than an American Insurance company having people type for them is the fact that Unileaver, Guinness, Mobil, Total, and most of the other Global Companies that operate in Ghana - use software that has been written and developed in Ghana.

Where the figure of only 50 coders in Ghana comes from is a wrong - I personally know more programmers than that are based in Ghana. Some are good - some are bad and some are brilliant - in fact two of them are some of the best in world that I have ever worked with. In fact one education faculty produces about 2000 graduates a year in IT related fields.

I have no idea where he came up with the price of $1,000 to install a phone line - when I was last in Ghana at the start of this month - Ghana Telecoms where not charging for installation.

While mobile phone calls are unreliable they are not 10 times more expensive than the US - they are in fact about 1 cent more per minute than what I am paying in the UK.

The high costs are there for international calls- a minute from Ghana to the US will cost you 80 cents - from the UK to the US 3 cents. This makes it very difficult for the local software houses to get business from abroad.

Yes power is a problem (But is that much different for California)and that is why myself and a group of other African programmers (Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, and South Africa) are starting a new standard called Tropical Tolerance. This is to set a standard for Software and Hardware that will work under poor power - it useless having a large database if it takes 9 hours to recover from a shutdown - do not try sending multi-media files over the network, or any form of software that relies on a WAN - make it easy to use.

In the whole this article reinforce the concept that Africa is just a black hole.